Cornelia kept padding around the armchair, back and forth between my legs. She wouldn’t stop but to nip at the hem of my pants. I told her to knock it off. She made her way to the door, scratched at the floorboards. She must have heard something outside. That’s why Benedict gave her to me. He said that I couldn’t spot a bear from thirty feet and that I needed some soul watching over me. Might as well have a look outside just to be sure.
I couldn’t see anything through the window, so I opened the door and Cornelia was off like a bolt. She came back not two minutes later, tugging at my pants leg, barking and zipping around again. She was all riled up about Benedict’s shed.
The door wasn’t shut all the way. Some animal could have holed up in there during the storm. I used my feet to clear away some snow and get the door a bit more open and before long I made out something inside. I blinked to get used to the darkness.
Benedict’s pickup truck was there, half covered. That wasn’t like him to do things halfway. I couldn’t hear a thing apart from Cornelia yipping and spinning around like she’d found a bone. I told her not now, we weren’t going for a drive, but she was barking so loud that something moved in the cabin, where the tarp had slipped off a bit. As I walked over I grabbed the handle of a spade leaning against the wall.
I tried to peek through the window but it was fogged up. I opened the door ever so carefully and saw the boy, bundled up in one of those survival blankets, with Benedict’s old sheepskin jacket wrapped around his legs. He didn’t look terribly brave. I asked him what he was doing there and he was panting as he said he was trying not to sleep, that he absolutely mustn’t go to sleep when he’s cold because then he might never wake up. That was the oddest sight I’d ever seen—a bundled-up kid rattling off things he’d definitely read in a book—and I just burst out laughing.
I lifted him up in my arms and told him he was frozen solid just like a little ice Eskimo. I took little Thomas to Benedict’s house, set him down on the couch with all the bedding I could find to help warm him up, and I started a proper fire. I asked him what he was doing in the shed when it was this cold and, before he fell asleep, he just said it was a funny story and that he wanted to wait for Bess and Benedict to come back.
So we waited for them—a good while, to be honest—but I wasn’t one bit worried. I was nice and warm, sitting on this couch with the kid’s head resting on my lap, the dog at my feet and the fire crackling, and I felt like the grandfather I’d never be.